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Steampunk book series has Grey Bruce roots

Becky Dier-McComb, aka Rebecca Diem, showcases the newest instalment of her steampunk novel series, The Tales of the Captain Duke - From Haven to Hell. A Grey Bruce release party was held at the Ginger Press in Owen Sound, where the book is available. NELSON PHILLIPS/WIARTON ECHO/POSTMEDIA PHOTO

Chatsworth native Becky Dier-McComb recently released the second installment of her Victorian England-based novel series, The Tales of the Captain Duke - From Haven to Hell, celebrating its local release in downtown OS publishing house and cafe, the Ginger Press.

Dier-McComb writes under the pen name Rebecca Diem, and has ties to the Wiarton and Owen Sound areas, which are referenced in her books - a steampunk adventure series that follows main character Clara, a runaway pseudo-pirate debutante.

Dier-McComb describes steampunk as the “greatest era that never was.”

“It’s a kind of Victorian futurism,” says Dier-McComb. “It’s inspired by the technology coming from a steam-powered age. It takes a lot of those different Victorian morals and different attitudes and goes completely sideways with them. In my case it diverges from our history around 1865-66. It takes the elements from a Victorian society and re-imagines them.”

Dier-McComb says the ideology of steampunk as a narrative tradition borrows a punk aesthetic that adapts to modern sensibilities in order to challenge pre-described notions of power and time. The steampunk tradition is perhaps most notably illustrated in the popular work of Jules Verne, who authored 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Dier-McComb says she was influenced to write the four part series while reading other authors work that prompted her to invent her own characters.

“I was reading Neil Gaiman, Virginia Woolf, a bunch of other authors - a couple of these names just stuck in my head and started forming out of the gaseous dust of whatever you’re reading at the time. I had this image of this girl who was sitting in the cargo hold of an airship that was actually full of gunpowder, and I wanted to hear the rest of her story so I started writing it,” said Dier-McComb.

In the first book of the series, The Stowaway Debutante, main character Clara runs away from her engagement party, recounts Dier-McComb. Clara winds up on an airship headed for England when the ship is attacked by pirates. Clara ends up talking her way into joining the pirate crew and tries to shake off the her debutante image.

“She really takes her life into her own hands,” says Dier-McComb. “Going on this adventure on her own.”

In the second novel, From Haven to Hell, Dier-McComb says the plot becomes more complex as Clara must find a way to come into her own as a member of the crew and learn to trust the pirates in return, before secrets from her own past are unearthed.

Dier-McComb says that while the series is set in Victorian England, two break-out characters, Cat and Mouse - two young airship pirates who have been flying all their lives - are based on two real life Bruce Peninsula residents, Catherine and Morris Waugh.

“That’s a connection to my Grandma Dier,” says Dier-McComb. “Her grandfather, Captain Francis J. Waugh, was actually a captain on the Great Lakes barges. He was based around Wiarton and Owen Sound. The idea is that Cat and Mouse are fictional cousins... and in the next series I think they might have to come pay their cousin a visit and check out Grey Bruce.”

Dier-McComb says that historical research both local and international have become an interesting topic for her to reference and investigate as she writes.

A text that is continually referenced by her characters was written by Eustace Grenville Murray, the British-French journalist and son of Richard Grenville, second duke of Buckingham and Chandos. Murray contributed to the first numbers of Vanity Fair, and started a weekly journal, entitled The Queen’s Messenger. Grenville was famously horsewhipped by Lord Carrington, a British Liberal politician and aristocrat for slander.

“He wrote about modernizing Great Britain’s diplomatic structures... I thought that even though his work has faded from our consciousness, this is someone who would have been read extensively at the time,” said Dier-McComb.

The Tales of the Captain Duke series is published by Woolf Like Me Publishing, and is available on Amazon, Kobo, and at the Ginger Press in Owen Sound.